With so many free icon sets available now, sometimes it makes more sense to not spend countless hours designing and creating your own. However, it’s important that you do find the right style of icons to match your design. In the case of minimal web design, it’s all about clean layouts, little use of color, and few design elements.

"Graphical user interfaces are full of symbols. Symbols need to be reduced to their essence. This helps avoid cluttering the user interface with meaningless distractions, and makes it easier for people to «read» the symbol and figure out the meaning of an interface element. Realistic details can get in the way of what you’re trying to communicate to your users."